No redirection after paypal payment

Hi! For some reason, just for the last few days, whenever someone pays they are NOT redirected, or there is a delay of several hours before they get an email or some information to sign up. So far in the last couple of days everyone who has purchased entry has emailed me with this issue and I’ve had to add them to the system manually.

How can I see what’s causing the problem, and then fix it? Let me know what information you might need.

Thanks!

Hello Benny, thanks for your inquiry.

Could you please post the transaction logs in some code tags? You can find the logs under wp-content\plugins\s2member-logs.

Thanks!

Thanks for the quick reply!
I went into this directory and only found one file: .htaccess
On opening it, the content only consisted of one discouraging sentence:
“deny from all”

Hi Benny. That sounds like you don’t have logging enabled yet.
Please see: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Account Details -› Logging

Regarding emails. Who is your hosting provider please? Have you integrated with s2Member Pro Forms I presume? If so, please tell us a little bit more about what your configuration looks like. If emails are simply being delayed, that’s often a problem at the server level, and you might consider an email to your hosting provider.

Please let us know if problems persist.

OK, I’ve enabled logging!

Not sure if it’s an email provider problem, but the settings are definitely correct since I don’t have this issue all the time. All my emails are sent through Google as far as I know.

The last sale for example was able to sign up immediately so it’s not a consistent problem. I updated to the latest version of s2member (until yesterday it was the December update), so I’m not sure if that makes any difference.

Let me know if there is specific information I can provide that will help, or if it would be easier to just provide the log next time a delay occurs.

Hi Benny,

Are you offerring a free trial period? With the free trial period, PayPal can sometimes take a little while to get back to s2Member about the transaction. In those cases, s2Member doesn’t know right away if the user completed the checkout, so the user is required to wait until they receive an email from s2Member inviting them to register (s2Member generates that email when it receives confirmation of checkout from PayPal via an IPN message).

You may see something like the following in your log file for the delayed transactions:

0 => 'No Return-Data. Customer must wait for Email Confirmation.',
1 => 'Redirecting Customer to the Home Page. Customer must wait for Email Confirmation.',
2 => 'Note. This can sometimes happen when/if you are offering a free Trial Period. There are times when a Payment Gateway will NOT supply s2Member with any data immediately after checkout. When/if this happens, s2Member must process the transaction via IPN only ( i.e. behind-the-scene ), and the Customer must wait for Email Confirmation in these cases.',

If this is what’s happening, then there really isn’t any way around it (other than switching to Pro-Forms, which allows your user to register for an account as part of the checkout process). Your users will need to wait until PayPal notifies s2Member of a successful transaction and then they will need to use the link in that email to register their account (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Signup Confirmation Email).

Thanks for the reply. It just happened again a few hours ago, even though it DIDN’T happen several hours before that.

There is NO free trial period, and there is no “customer must wait for email confirmation” in either of the logs.

I have two logs: one is aweber-api.log, (all sales emails are added to my aweber list)

This shows the email of the person that has been added to the list, but the only reason they are on it is because I added them manually myself when the customer complained that they hadn’t received anything.

The other is paypal-ipn.log It confirms the payment.

Here is that log (private information edited out). I hope this helps you can see why this didn’t lead to immediate access to the log in page for the customer, although it confirms an email was sent.

Slow emails aren’t the issue, as I believe the site should simply redirect them to the page to fill in their log in information immediately after payment, so they shouldn’t HAVE to check their email. Hopefully something here helps.

If one of the admins wants to make a purchase on the site to check it out, I’ll refund the paypal payment immediately, this way you can see for yourself what happens.

PHP v5.3.5 :: WordPress® v3.3.1 :: s2Member® v120309 :: s2Member® Pro v120309
Memory 42.59 MB :: Real Memory 43.50 MB :: Peak Memory 42.73 MB :: Real Peak Memory 43.50 MB
speakfromday1.com/?s2member_paypal_notify=1
User-Agent: 
array (
  'mc_gross' => '87.00',
  'invoice' => 'XX',
  'protection_eligibility' => 'Ineligible',
  'payer_id' => 'XX',
  'tax' => 'XX',
  'payment_date' => '11:21:43 Mar 20, 2012 PDT',
  'payment_status' => 'Completed',
  'charset' => 'windows-1252',
  'first_name' => 'XX',
  'option_selection1' => 'speakfromday1.com',
  'option_selection2' => 'XX',
  'mc_fee' => '3.69',
  'notify_version' => '3.4',
  'custom' => 'speakfromday1.com',
  'payer_status' => 'verified',
  'business' => 'XX',
  'quantity' => '1',
  'verify_sign' => 'XX',
  'payer_email' => 'XX',
  'option_name1' => 'Originating Domain',
  'option_name2' => 'Customer IP Address',
  'txn_id' => 'XX',
  'payment_type' => 'instant',
  'last_name' => 'XX',
  'receiver_email' => 'XX',
  'payment_fee' => 'XX',
  'receiver_id' => 'XX',
  'txn_type' => 'web_accept',
  'item_name' => 'XX',
  'mc_currency' => 'USD',
  'item_number' => '2',
  'residence_country' => 'US',
  'handling_amount' => '0.00',
  'transaction_subject' => 'speakfromday1.com',
  'payment_gross' => '87.00',
  'shipping' => '0.00',
  'ipn_track_id' => 'XX',
  's2member_log' => 
  array (
    0 => 'IPN received on: Tue Mar 20, 2012 6:21:50 pm UTC',
    1 => 's2Member POST vars verified through a POST back to PayPal®.',
    2 => 's2Member originating domain ( `$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]` ) validated.',
    3 => 's2Member `txn_type` identified as ( `web_accept|subscr_signup` ).',
    4 => 's2Member `txn_type` identified as ( `web_accept|subscr_signup` ) w/o update vars.',
    5 => 'Signup Confirmation Email sent to: "XX" <XX>.',
    6 => 'Storing Signup Tracking Codes into a Transient Queue. These will be processed on-site.',
    7 => 'Storing `payment` for Subscription via ( `web_accept` ).',
    8 => 'Creating an IPN response for `subscr_payment`. This will go into a Transient Queue; and be processed during registration.',
    9 => 'Storing IPN signup vars into a Transient Queue. These will be processed on registration.',
  ),
  'subscr_gateway' => 'paypal',
  'subscr_id' => 'XX',
  'eotper' => NULL,
  'ccaps' => NULL,
  'level' => '2',
  'ip' => 'XX',
  'period1' => '0 D',
  'mc_amount1' => '0.00',
  'period3' => '1 L',
  'mc_amount3' => '87.00',
  'initial_term' => '0 D',
  'initial' => '87.00',
  'regular' => '87.00',
  'regular_term' => '1 L',
  'recurring' => '0',
)

OK, I believe I see the problem. The person contacted me and said that they checked their spam filter and found the emails. So apparently my email has been blacklisted? I’ll have to work on this – maybe if I change to a similar email address for notifications it won’t happen… suggestions appreciated if there is something I can change within s2member to reduce the spamminess of my email.

However, the way I would like to fix this problem is to have the payment screen redirect them to the sign-up page, so delayed or spammed emails won’t be an issue. Is this feasible? As a workaround, which screen are they directed to after payment? I can at least add a message here to check their spam filter.

Edit: It’s definitely something specific about emails coming from S2member or my WordPress site. Since they get all other emails from me. This ALSO happens when I add them MANUALLY. That email with their log in details also goes to spam. But me emailing them directly or via aweber on the exact same email account gets through fine.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by  Benny Lewis.

Benny,

Email issues are most often the result of your default server configuration. By default, WordPress will use the mail agent on the local web server to send your emails. However, other servers may detect those emails as spam because they haven’t been authenticated.

The way to fix this is to install and configure an SMTP plugin in WordPress so that all emails WordPress sends are authenticated to an SMTP server. I had the same email-going-to-spam issue until I installed and configured an SMTP plugin to use smtp.gmail.com to authenticate my outgoing emails.

See this KB article for more info: Knowledge Base » Troubleshooting Email Delivery Problems

Regarding the redirect after payment: If you forced s2Member to redirect to the registration form, you’d have spotty results with users registering because they may try registering before s2Member has received the IPN message from PayPal indicating the user made a successful purchase. If the user registered before s2Member receives that information, their account wouldn’t be linked to the transaction they just made.

That’s why the alternative is to use the Pro-Forms and have them register their account during the checkout process. That way, they can login immediately as a free subscriber and as soon as s2Member receives the IPN message from PayPal, their account will be given the necessary access.